Ever since the advent of the computer networks (including the Internet), enterprise environments have been steadily growing more complicated, encompassing an ever-expanding amount of increasingly complex digital assets (or just assets). A digital asset, in essence, is anything that exists in a binary format that may exist in the enterprise environment or otherwise be utilized by the enterprise. The digital assets of an enterprise may thus include a variety of digital content (content) including text, images, aural or video content, templates used in content delivery or other types of content. For purposes of this disclosure, the term content will be used interchangeably with the term asset and understood to have the same definition as an asset.
In an enterprise environment, these assets may be widely distributed and used for a wide variety of purposes in association with that enterprise. Previously, most enterprises kept departments siloed by function. For example, a website team was separate from their print team, which was separated from the marketing team. Content within the enterprise may have been similarly segmented; one department maintained and used the content within that department.
Now, however, all these disparate parts of an enterprise are starting to converge and overlap. In this converged environment, the various departments may share a number of assets and the departments may utilize assets from across the enterprise. Moreover, assets may build upon one another, such that an asset created by one department may include assets from one or more other departments.
To aid in managing and using their various assets, many enterprises have employed a number of content management systems, such as digital asset management (DAM) systems, content management systems (CMS), web content management (WCM) systems, enterprise content management (ECM) systems, etc. The distribution of content across an enterprise in these various management systems, along with widespread and distributed use of such content, therefore results in an extremely complex web of interconnectivity involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of systems or people.
While the types of content management systems discussed above are useful in creating, versioning and controlling access to content, they do not provide any insight into the usage and flow of the content across the enterprise. It is thus virtually impossible for it to be determined where content is used, the repository where an asset originated or resides, what content contains a particular asset or other data pertaining to the usage or movement of content within an enterprise.
It would be desirable, therefore, to have the ability to track the usage, flow and communication of assets within an enterprise along with the ability to easily search such asset data.